It would seem that working on scientific terminology was an activity that was mainly carried out at night.Footnote 1 At the beginning of the 20th century, the engineer Kazimierz Obrębowicz spent his nights at his vocabulary machine in Warsaw choosing the most appropriate words for Polish technical terminology.Footnote 2 During the First World War, Ukrainian scholars met at night in Kyiv in small disciplinary groups, devising new Ukrainian scientific language.Footnote 3 Although the authors of these descriptions wanted to describe toiling in the twilight as something romantic, they also placed such terminological endeavours in a liminal space. It was being done when the serious part of the day was over, after work or study. Apart from the romantic element, terminological work was rather mundane, which may be why it has received limited attention in historiography and in the history of science, having been primarily examined within the history of language.Footnote 4
Nevertheless, there have been times when scientific terminology has been high on the cultural agenda and intertwined with literary and scientific processes. This was the case in Soviet Ukraine after the First World War. This article analyses the writing and rewriting of Ukrainian terminology in the inter-war period, which for the Ukrainian language was initially a period of prosperity and later one of decline, concisely summed up by the terms ‘Red Renaissance’ and ‘Executed Renaissance’.Footnote 5 Scientific vocabulary was part of the language revival that began during the war and continued with the support of korenizatsiia, a Soviet policy of state support for indigenous cultures, from Armenian to Ukrainian to Yakut.Footnote 6 Once this policy was revoked, those scholars who were designing the new vocabulary were suppressed and their work was rewritten, sometimes quite literally. Therefore, in many ways, the history of scientific terminology mirrors the history of the Ukrainian language in the early 20th century.
Language histories have become rather popular in recent decades, and East-Central Europe has played an important part in this process.Footnote 7 This is primarily related to the role of language in the conceptualisation of imagined communities and nations and thus to non-essentialist historiography in general.Footnote 8 At the same time, historians have increasingly questioned the assumption of one language–one (imagined) nation that underlies Benedict Anderson’s conceptualisation of imagined communities, claiming it may have been too hasty.Footnote 9 Less attention has been paid to the process of imagining and designing so-called standard or literary language as a process of negotiation between different groups with their own particular interests.Footnote 10 However, as this article will show, investigating language design provides insight into the changing imaginations of nations and the processes of inclusion and exclusion that are associated with it.
Focusing on practices of designing terminology and compiling terminology dictionaries, I argue that more attention should be paid to the geographical aspects of language design, in this case to shifts of borders and thus population, and their influence on the imagined communities to which the language projects refer. In the case of Ukrainian, differences in the standardisation of the varieties of the language under the Habsburg and Romanov empires had a major influence on the language-shaping processes of the 1920s and 1930s and were mobilised for political ends. At the same time, the shift in focus of Soviet standardisation from pan-Ukrainian to eastern (Soviet) Ukrainian, which was also politically motivated, affected both the language and the careers of those who worked on it.
The work on terminology meandered between numerous interests and prerogatives, spanning cultural, political and scientific interests. This article thus addresses the intersection of the national and the international, as scientific terminology is linked to science, which has always been seen as an endeavour undertaken in relation to others. Additionally, the understanding and practice of science changed in the period examined here. Whereas the Ukrainian term nauka meant both science and scholarship and was thus equivalent to German Wissenschaft, in the Soviet times it was brought closer to the technical and natural sciences. Finally, the 19th-century romantic idea that scientific knowledge should be based on popular knowledge paved the way for the democratisation of science and the inclusion of lay people in the production of science, on the one hand, and interest in popular knowledge and vocabulary, on the other.Footnote 11
Changes in the language of scientific publishing have not been uncommon throughout history, and while English is currently perceived as the leading language of science, Chinese will be its future competitor.Footnote 12 Along with German and French, Russian was once a short-lived competitor for primacy. This happened especially when it was supported by policies of cultural and scientific diplomacy during the Cold War, as well as more directly by policies of power consolidation in the late 19th century (the Russification of higher education in the Romanov Empire), Stalinism and also periods of repression in the satellite states following, for example, the Hungarian Revolution of 1956 and the Prague Spring of 1968.Footnote 13 The local languages of science also changed. It was not until the second half of the 19th century that a dualism between national and international languages stabilised in East-Central Europe, with both used depending on the audience.Footnote 14 And it was this that necessitated the creation of scientific terminologies.
All contemporary literary languages have been subject to some degree of management and planning.Footnote 15 This was even more prevalent in the languages of science, which had to cover a rapidly expanding area of increasingly abstract concepts and new discoveries. Following the French and German models, in the late 18th and early 19th centuries the idea prevailed in East-Central Europe that the language of science should be based primarily on the vernacular, with varying degrees of regulation by the elites. When vernacular words were not available, vocabulary from ancient literature was to be used or words from neighbouring languages. At the same time, conservative language activists, usually labelled ‘purists’, wanted to remove words they considered foreign and replace them with those they considered native, although their impact on scientific vocabulary was quite limited.
However, categories of ‘neighbouring’ and ‘foreign’ were not stable. Both the spoken and written vernaculars, not to mention ancient literature, were far from what purists imagined their language to be. What they considered foreign might have been viewed as neighbouring (or even native) in another region, especially when those regions were divided by imperial borders.Footnote 16 Imagined affinities between languages changed and were contested – the relationships between Russian and Ukrainian, Polish and Ruthenian (official designation of the Ukrainian variety in Galicia), but also Ruthenian and Ukrainian were the most crucial for this history.Footnote 17 These boundaries were set by scholars, language policymakers and language activists, who were often the same person, and were informed by their political preferences and nationalist imaginations.Footnote 18
The conviction that in the process of nation-building there was no one ancient language that was transformed into a literary language supports the thesis of the constructed character of nations. Scholars of Ukraine have also raised this question in inquiring into conflicting identity projects, especially in Habsburg Galicia.Footnote 19 Various identity projects that existed in the 19th century – Ruthenian, Ruthenian-Ukrainian (Ukrainophile) and Russophile, to mention but the most important ones – were linked to the idea of a ‘correct’ language and alphabet (e.g., the use of Russian and/or Old Church Slavic characters). While some of these tensions were resolved in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, many after-effects were felt well into the inter-war period. As I will show, they shaped the way in which scientific vocabulary was constructed. At the same time, the difference between the languages of Galicia and Ukraine and the way they were managed in the process of language planning to demonstrate the unity of the Ukrainian population was instrumentalised in the 1930s to justify the beginning of the policy of Russification of the Ukrainian language.
In this article, I will first outline the prehistory of Ukrainian scientific vocabulary from the first organised efforts in Galicia in the second half of the 19th century to the outbreak of the First World War against the background of the general language policy of East-Central Europe. Then, after outlining the Ukrainisation policy of the nascent Soviet Union, I will discuss the terminological work of the Institute of Ukrainian Scientific Language (Instytut ukraïns’koï naukovoï movy, hereafter IUNM) at the All-Ukrainian Academy of Sciences (Vsheukraïns’ka akademiya nauk, hereafter VUAN). As I will argue, the rewriting of Ukrainian scientific terminology from the early 1920s to the first wave of Russification in 1934 can be best understood as a conjunction of political and geographical reorientations at the intersection of national and socialist policies.
Nationalising Scientific Terminology
The issue of language revival was central to several emerging nationalisms of the 19th century. The Czech philosopher Vladimír Macura wrote of the linguocentrism of early 19th-century Czech culture,Footnote 20 which was a statement that could apply equally to the Polish culture of the same time and Ukrainian culture in the late 19th century until the outbreak of the Second World War. Both Ukrainian and Polish cases were complicated by the fact that the national imagination encompassed populations in two empires, Habsburg and Russian, which were at times hostile to each other and imposed prohibitions on, for example, cross-border exchanges of literature. In addition, both empires pursued policies of language-based state-building, albeit with varying degrees of intensity. Ukrainian was particularly suppressed in the Romanov Empire, with the decrees of Emperor Alexander II of 1863 (Valuev Circular) and of 1876 (Ems Ukaz) prohibiting the printing of materials in Ukrainian until 1905, with only a few exceptions, such as belles-lettres (allowed in Valuev Circular; allowed in Ems Ukaz if written in ‘all-Russian orthography’ and with censors’ permission), historical sources and collections of folk tales.Footnote 21
The repression of Ukrainian came in response to the slow but steady growth of political, organisational, cultural and literary activity in the language in the Romanov Empire and the threat of rising nationalist and separatist sentiment. Rather than curbing national activism, the repressions led the pro-Ukrainian elites to support efforts in Habsburg Galicia, paving the way for the trans-imperial Ukrainianness of the late 19th century, epitomised by the Kyiv-born Mykhailo Hrushevsky, Professor of General History and History of Eastern Europe at L’viv University. Hrushevsky’s efforts to forge a Habsburg–Russian–Ukrainian unity, both organisationally and intellectually, were crucial to the imagination of trans-imperial Ukraine in the early 20th century.Footnote 22
Habsburg Galicia became central to the Ukrainian revival of the late 19th century, although it had had a profound influence on the language before that time. The literary group Ruthenian Triad (Markiian Shashkevych, Yakiv Holovatsky and Ivan Vahylevych), which was formed at the Greek Catholic Theological Seminary in L’viv, published a collection of folk songs and stories titled Rusalka Dnistrovaia (Mermaid of the Dniester) in 1837 in the written vernacular instead of the clergy’s mixture of Church Slavonic and Old Slavic. After a few years of scattered efforts, 1848 brought an intensification of scientific work, concentrated on historiography and literary sciences. However, there was no decision as to which language version would be used.Footnote 23 While the Habsburg government of the time intended to publish dictionaries for school use, a Ukrainian dictionary never appeared. There were also ideas about publishing a series of school textbooks, but only a few were published, mostly using vocabulary close to Russian.Footnote 24
According to Romantic ideas, which began to gain importance in Galicia and Ukraine in the 1860s, national culture should be based on continuity between the people and its elites. Romantic philosophers posited that the folk culture and language were the most unspoiled and thus the model to follow, which influenced the language debate throughout East-Central Europe.Footnote 25 The shift in the vernacular was derived from an unexpected place – St Petersburg – where a short-lived journal founded by Ukrainian intellectuals entitled Osnova (Basis) published content in and about the Ukrainian vernacular in the period 1861–2. It also included glossaries of more complicated terms, which provided models for later efforts. While Osnova’s readership was certainly limited, both within and outside the Romanov Empire, it inspired young Galician scholars such as the botanist Ivan Verkhradskyǐ to continue their studies in the vernacular. This intensified with the expansion of the Ukrainian school system in Galicia that began in the 1870s and the resulting need for textbooks. These were written with the support of the Prosvita (Enlightenment) society, which favoured the vernacular and commonality of languages in Galicia and Ukraine. The creation of the Shevchenko Literary Society in L’viv in 1873 intensified the trend. Taras Shevchenko was a highly symbolic figure, as he was the Romanov Empire’s vernacular Ukrainian poet, who was interested in the folk, its customs and language. In 1892 the society became the Shevchenko ScientificFootnote 26 Society (Naukove tovarystvo im. Shevchenka, hereafter NTSh), which increasingly took on the role of a pan-Ukrainian Academy of Sciences. It was publishing scientific journals in and about the Ukrainian vernacular, as the creation of terminology and its use went hand in hand. The mathematician Volodymyr Levytsky and, above all, the aforementioned Verkhradskyǐ were instrumental in creating the scientific terminology in Galicia that was later adopted in Ukraine after publishing in Ukrainian was eventually permitted in 1905. The 1890s was also the period in which phonetic orthography was declared official for Ukrainian in Galicia. Its proponents stressed that it emphasised the characteristics of the vernacular, while contested orthographies shared more with Russian and Old Church Slavic.Footnote 27
While the restrictions of the Romanov Empire partially returned in 1910, interest in Ukrainian scientific language continued to grow, fuelled by the famous four-volume Hrinchenko dictionary (1907–9)Footnote 28 and the activities of the Kyiv-based NTSh-affiliated Ukrainian Scientific Society. Such interest is exemplified by Oleksandr Yanata, who as a young student in 1910 founded a terminological commission in the Naturalist Circle at Kyiv Polytechnic. After the Circle was disbanded, he kept collecting terminology with his wife, Natalia Osadcha, in the later stages of his career, in Crimea and Kharkiv. He proposed a plan to collect Ukrainian botanical nomenclature in 1912, which laid the basis for post–First World War endeavours in this area.Footnote 29
This overview of the trans-imperialisation and vernacularisation of Ukrainian scientific language should not disguise the fact that this process was neither easy nor straightforward. There were problems with both the trans-imperial and the vernacular aspects and the combination of them. In short, a truly vernacular trans-imperial vocabulary could function as such only if based on sources from both empires, or if we assume that the vernacular was shared between two empires, only one would be sufficient. A glance at Verkhradskyǐ’s dictionaries reveals that naturalist terminology varied even within Galicia, and while he undertook some collecting expeditions to Ukraine, the NTSh was focused on the humanities and offered limited funding for naturalists.Footnote 30 Thus, his dictionary was more Galician than trans-imperial.Footnote 31
At that time, there was no uniform approach to the creation of words for more complex terms that did not exist in the vernacular. They could come from old books, other languages (internationalisms/loanwords, which could come from different languages and create a boundary to other languages) or transformations of vernacular terminology. Much depended on the personal preferences of individual authors – of not only the few dictionaries that were published but also the textbooks and pamphlets that were more widely distributed. In 1861 Mykhailo Levchenko proposed vernacular physical terminology that Ukrainised even widely used international terms such as mechanics – sylodiïnia (the study of the activity [dilo] of forces [syla]); and physics – Syl′nytsia (the study of the influence of bodies on other bodies, i.e., force [syla]). Although this was used in some publications of the time, scholars tended not to vernacularise everything. There were scholars who proposed two (or more) alternatives. In contrast, Levytsky proposed using both international and vernacular Ukrainian terms, such as membrana/blona for membrane, analiz/rozbir for analysis and dyspersiia/rozshchiplenye for dispersion. In these examples (and many more in his texts), the vernacular terms were also the equivalents for Polish terms.Footnote 32
Like other Central European languages a few decades earlier and others, such as Uzbek, a few decades later, the written scientific language of early 20th-century Ukraine contained a plethora of synonyms.Footnote 33 As in the Czech and Polish cases, the unification and stabilisation of terms were connected with the institutionalisation and establishment of academies of science, a process that will be described in detail in the next part of this article. This process was taking place under various political and geographical circumstances, which shifted the centre of science production in Ukrainian from Habsburg Galicia to Kyiv, first within the independent Ukrainian People’s Republic and then within the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic.
The consolidation of scientific terminology for school use was one of the demands of the General Secretariat of the Ukrainian Scientific Society shortly after its establishment at the end of 1917. This led to the creation of the Terminological Commission of the Natural Science Section of the Ukrainian Scientific Society, which was composed mainly of local scholars, including Yanata, and also the young philologist Olena Kurylo.Footnote 34 Kurylo, who would later play a (more) prominent role in the IUNM, was not only an indication of the professionalisation of terminological work, which, according to the statutes of the Commission, should not be the sole preserve of naturalists but always in cooperation with a philologist. Born into a Jewish family near Grodno (now in Belarus), she was also an exception among Ukrainian terminologists, as Ukrainian was neither her first nor second language. She first became interested in Ukrainian during her studies at the University of Warsaw, where she studied with the renowned Ukrainian linguist Yevhen Tymchenko. Soon after the First World War she moved to Kyiv and, in 1918, participated in the planning of Ukrainian with a highly regarded school grammar and comments on medical terminology.Footnote 35 The Terminological Commission published several dictionaries, prepared a volume on naturalist terminology (which was lost when the Bolsheviks nationalised publishing houses)Footnote 36 and, by 1919, had collected over 160,000 index cards, a figure that had risen to 220,000 by 1920. More intensive activities were hindered by limited resources, problems with the lack of electricity in the evenings (especially in the winter of 1920–1) and also a lack of commitment beyond a limited circle of enthusiasts. The idea was floated that the Commission should oversee the language of all scientific publications and schoolbooks, but it seems that it did not get beyond the proposal stage.Footnote 37 For example, to animate regional scholars and collect vernacular vocabulary – most likely based on Yanata’s earlier proposal – the Commission prepared 10,000 copies of instructions and sent them to teachers, village intelligentsia and students.Footnote 38 However, the amount of vocabulary sent back to Kyiv was below expectations.Footnote 39
It appears that only a few enthusiasts carried out most of the work. In the autobiography of Kost’ Turkalo, a lecturer in chemistry, a teacher of Ukrainian and later a member of the Institute of the Ukrainian Language, there is a description of their activities:
Dozens of us, Ukrainians, met in the evenings in different parts of the city, and without any pay, guided only by a patriotic duty, we worked on the scientific terminology of various sciences, each according to his discipline. This work […] began in the pre-revolutionary period and was carried out by already formed Ukrainian groups. It had a great impact, since for several years we collected and processed a lot of material, and it was only thanks to this that the Ukrainian Academy of Sciences was able to publish several dozen terminological dictionaries within a few years.Footnote 40
At the newly established Ukrainian Academy of Sciences, a terminology commission was set up in the history and philology department, headed by Yanata.Footnote 41 Faced with financial problems, a lack of staff and political regime changes, it produced little activity.Footnote 42 This situation only changed in June 1921, when both institutions were merged into the IUNM as part of the reformed Academy, which was soon renamed the VUAN. The real intensification of work, however, took place under the auspices of the Soviet Union’s new cultural policy of Ukrainisation, as part of the Soviet support for indigenous cultures.
Language for Modernisation
In Soviet history the 1920s are associated with korenizatsiia, a policy of support for indigenous cultures, which included support for language, literature and arts. One of the central points of this policy was to encourage the use of national languages in all spheres of social life, from primary education to literature and science. There were both ideological and pragmatic reasons for this policy. The Bolsheviks presented themselves as representatives of the workers and peasants and opposed anything associated with tsarism – including Russification policies. Additionally, many short-lived post–First World War republics had fuelled nationalising activities among the elites, and therefore reversing them was likely to provoke unrest.Footnote 43 The intensity and timing of korenizatsiia varied, depending on the state of the literary languages and availability of scholars, as some languages had not previously been used as literary languages. Since industrialisation was a fixed point in the state policy of technology-based modernisation, the creation of vocabularies relevant to industry – chemical, mathematical and technical – was a priority, along with medical vocabularies. Terminology work became an integral part of the new institutional framework of academic and cultural institutions. These included the IUNM in the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic, the Commission for Scientific Terminology, later reformed into the Institute of Belarusian Culture in Minsk (Belorussian Soviet Socialist Republic),Footnote 44 the State Scientific Board (from 1925 the Central Scientific Terminological Committee) in Tbilisi (Transcaucasian Socialist Federative Soviet Republic; from 1936, Georgian Soviet Socialist Republic)Footnote 45 and many others throughout the Soviet Union.
The Ukrainian language also made its way into higher education, although this process took place over the course of the decade. At universities, the number of scholars who spoke and lectured in Ukrainian grew as the new generation replaced the predominantly Russian-speaking old one, and textbooks in Ukrainian also appeared. From the mid-1920s Ukrainian was dominant at Kyiv’s universities and in smaller newly created ones (e.g., Kamianets-Podilskyi), but Russian was still prevalent in Kharkiv and Odessa.Footnote 46 Ukrainian was also increasingly the language of books. After the proclamation of the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic in 1921, the percentage of books (fiction and non-fiction) in Ukrainian fell to around 30 per cent in the period 1921–4 from around 50 per cent in 1917–20. However, it then rose to 53.9 per cent in 1927–8 and 76.9 per cent in 1931. Nevertheless, as Russian-language books were usually cheaper, the true circulation may not have corresponded to these figures.Footnote 47 The picture was slightly different for scientific literature. By 1927, just over 30 per cent of technical literature was printed in Ukrainian, up from 5 per cent in the early 1920s. By contrast, the VUAN had a rigorous Ukrainian language policy and over 90 per cent of its publications were in this language.Footnote 48
From a Ukrainian point of view, one of the highlights of this period was the International Orthographical Conference held in Kharkiv between 26 May and 6 June 1927, which brought together scholars from the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic and abroad to debate Ukrainian orthography and resulted in the adoption of significant reforms. This briefly resolved an issue that had divided Ukrainian national intellectuals for over a century and strengthened the symbolic unity of Ukrainians by accepting some peculiarities of Galician-Ukrainian. Ironically, this happened against the recommendations of the VUAN and the IUNM, whose representatives led the preparations on the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic’s side.Footnote 49 This led to trans-national Ukrainian cooperation, supported by the highest local politicians. One of the most prominent was Mykola Skrypnyk, after whom the orthography was named, who was the head of the Ukrainian Commissariat of Education. This opening toward vocabulary from Galicia was noticed also by language policymakers. The foreword to the third edition of the Hrinchenko Dictionary of Ukrainian from 1927 stated that:
[in] the past, because of numerous Galician expressions, the reader of a Ukrainian book could get into unpleasant difficulties facing strange words and phrases, and stop reading Ukrainian. Now that there is a Ukrainian school, Ukrainian institutions, a richer press and many dictionaries, Galician literary and linguistic heritage should not only not be rejected, but should be welcomed and put into general use, because the material prepared there is very often appropriate and coloured by European influences.Footnote 50
However, it is important to bear in mind that Ukrainisation had its limits. Those who argued for the need to distance Ukrainian from Russia and the Russian language were repressed as early as the mid-1920s, even if they considered and presented themselves as model Bolsheviks.Footnote 51 The 1930 trial of the Union for the Liberation of Ukraine (Spilka vyzvolennia Ukraïny or SVU), a show trial against a group of Ukrainian intellectuals who had (allegedly) attempted to establish an independent Ukrainian republic, included many language activists and terminologists. A similar fate befell Belarusian terminologists, as many language policymakers were also subjected to repression in the context of the persecution of the Union of Liberation of Belarus, which began almost simultaneously.
A second wave of purges in the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic began in 1933 as part of Stalin’s campaign against ‘local nationalisms’ and anti-Soviet behaviour. Around 100,000 people were purged from the party and often persecuted, making way for new cadres with more pro-Russian policies – even though the official policy spoke merely of revisions of Ukrainisation.Footnote 52 During this wave Skrypnyk was not spared. He attempted to mitigate the effects of the manufactured mass famine known as Holodomor, which was decimating Ukrainian villages in 1932–3, an attempt that Stalin saw as supporting the landowners. In effect, Skrypnyk was dismissed from all his posts and, fearing further reprisals, committed suicide. His policies were denounced, Ukrainisation was now defined as ‘Ukrainian bourgeois nationalism’, and references to the chauvinism of Petliura supporters (Symon Petliura was hetman of the Ukrainian People’s Republic) or Galicians were often used to describe the aberrations. What followed was a rapprochement between Ukrainian and Russian that is often referred to as the encroaching linguocide of Ukrainian.Footnote 53 Ironically, while the repression of 1933–4 mostly led to imprisonment and/or exile, only half a decade later those who led the first wave of oppression faced even more severe persecution and often death.
Soviet Ukrainian Terminology Makers
Upon its founding, the IUNM was headed by Ahatanhel Krymsky, an Orientalist and specialist in Ukrainian language and folklore, who served also as the secretary of the VUAN. He was among those scholars who were sceptical about both the historical influence of Galicia on the Ukrainian language and the need to include Galician vocabulary in future language planning.Footnote 54 However, he employed a number of scholars who were more open to the inclusion of Galician vocabulary and thus the policy of the Institute was not consistent, as I will discuss below. The Kyiv-Poltava dialect of Ukrainian was accepted as the standard within the Institute, with varying degrees of openness to vocabulary from other regions.Footnote 55
Work on dictionaries was carried out in sections, which were grouped into departments. Before a given term was accepted, it had to be checked by a philologist and, in theory, by the heads of the Institute, which soon became impossible because of the sheer number of terms. As the dictionaries differed in their policy on synonyms – some only included the preferred term, while others marked recommended terms but also included possible variantsFootnote 56 – the amount of collected vocabulary grew exponentially. Importantly, because of the need for rapid publication from a scholarly perspective, the published dictionaries were described as ‘projects’ and many of their prefaces expressed the idea that the final vocabulary might change in due course.
If the scholars needed more time, the politicians seemed unwilling to grant it. In 1926, the Ukrainian Commissariat of Education asked the Institute to intensify the production of dictionaries, while Krymsky, who held numerous positions within the Academy, was replaced by a specialist in physical and astronomical terminology, Hrihorii Kholodnyi. This change in leadership bore fruit.
Between 1921 and 1926, the Institute published five terminology projects, whereas in 1928 alone there were eight. In the same year, the Institute also began work on medical terminology, which had been strangely absent (although there had been previous projects, especially on anatomical vocabulary). In 1927, thirty-three dictionaries were being worked on in twenty-five sections, involving 227 people, with 1,567 official meetings per year (of apparently three hours each). Groups preparing dictionary manuscripts met every three days.Footnote 57 The era of the unpaid enthusiast, which lasted until the early 1920s, was coming to an end, as most of the staff were employees,Footnote 58 and the others were likely members of specialist scientific institutes who occasionally worked on terminology. By 1929, the Institute had amassed a library of 4,300 volumes and three million index cards in 500 boxes. However, problems arose due to inconsistencies and the lack of a prescribed methodology for creating index cards. For example, the publication of the 1928 botanical dictionary was delayed by a year due to problems with correctly identifying plants by their Ukrainian names, as the index cards often contained only Ukrainian names or their Russian equivalents without the Latin names.Footnote 59
The most important role in the Institute’s work was played by linguists and young scientists. The reason was simple: for the majority of established scientists in the Soviet Union, Russian was their first scientific language, even though Ukrainian may have been their first language. Some lived outside the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic, such as the most famous Ukrainian scholar of the time, Volodymyr Vernadsky, who was one of the strongest supporters of Ukrainian science but who did not want to leave Leningrad.Footnote 60 Most Galician-Ukrainian scholars remained in Galicia after 1918 (then Little Poland in the Second Polish Republic) or emigrated to Prague and were therefore not directly involved in terminological work in the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic. Thus, in the Institute, the typical roles in terminology production were reversed, since ordinarily scientists considered language issues of disciplinary vocabulary to be a matter for the practitioners of the respective disciplines,Footnote 61 whereas now trained linguists took the lead. In addition, the Institute repeatedly suggested the need for it to supervise all the Academy’s publications. But it faced opposition. In 1926, for example, scientists criticised the fact that philologists were encroaching on the competences and even the scientific autonomy of other institutes.Footnote 62
As the Institute’s dictionaries were committed to using the national/vernacular version of Ukrainian, this necessitated the creation of dictionaries of Ukrainian used beyond the centres. After 1926 and Skrypnyk’s proposals to strengthen vernacularisation, these efforts were intensified. Excursions to villages were sponsored, although it is unclear how much they yielded.Footnote 63 More popular were questionnaire collections. The Institute sent out instructions for collecting materials together with blank forms to be returned. The 1928 instructions for natural sciencesFootnote 64 stated that people who were ‘engaged in cultural work’ should be called upon to help, namely, ‘teachers, doctors, agronomists, directors of reading houses, [. . .] librarians and students in our high schools’.Footnote 65 They were to collect terminological material in the countryside, especially from people ‘whose work is connected with the needs of the villages: bakers, potters, blacksmiths, locksmiths, carpenters, weavers, hunters, machine operators’Footnote 66 and ideally those who had little contact with other languages, which would ensure that they spoke the ‘pure’ vernacular. The catalogue of questions suggested a rather varied set of basic terms that might be acquired in this way, but it remains an open question as to what effectively happened between the village and the dictionary. Nevertheless, the 1928 botanical dictionary referenced the names of 164 villages, with contributions sent in by activists and collected by members of the Institute itself.Footnote 67 The Legal Commission, which also became part of IUNM in 1926, collected vocabulary from across the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic in a similar way – including archival sources stored in regional archives.
The chemical terminology by Kurylo (1923), one of the most prolific dictionarists of the time, can serve as an example of the practice of meandering between the various interests typical of the scientific community of that period. In discussing the preparation of the dictionary, Kurylo referred to two 19th-century projects: that of Volodymyr Levycky of the NTSh, who took a national/vernacular approach and included Ukrainian terms modified by suffixes and prefixes to express compounds,Footnote 68 and that of Ivan Horbachevsky, professor at the Czech Charles Ferdinand University in Prague, who opted for international terminology with as little local vocabulary as possible.Footnote 69 Kurylo herself thought that since her dictionary was intended primarily for schools, terminology close to the vernacular would be the most understandable and therefore the most appropriate.Footnote 70
However, Levycky’s and Kurylo’s national approaches were somewhat different, as they were influenced by the empire from which these scholars came and, therefore, the people they spoke to. For example, Kurylo changed some Galician terms that sounded too Polish for her liking into Ukrainian terms based on Russian ones, such as kvas into kyslota (kwas is Polish for acid; kislota is Russian). Nevertheless, Kurylo wrote that only the future would tell whether national or international terminology would prevail, and her terminology was updated five years later in the Dictionary of Naturalist Terminology. The recommendations there were to use Latin roots with Ukrainised suffixes where there were no common Ukrainian names,Footnote 71 and to consistently use the ending with compounds (acids, salts, etc.). The bulk of the terminology, however, remained unchanged, and Kurylo was involved in the production of the dictionary, as both a member of the commission and the philologist in charge of the dictionary.Footnote 72 Interestingly, both dictionaries were Russian–Ukrainian, with terms numbered and a Ukrainian index (along with a shorter Latin–German one). The IUNM did not have a uniform approach to this issue, but Russian was mostly used as one of the index languages, although not the primary one.
Languages do not exist as separate entities surrounded by empty space, contrary to what the graphic representation of them in language trees might suggest. Thus, dictionary work is concerned with the intersections between languages and takes place in various trans-lingual collaborations. Although the work on Ukrainian terminology took place in the context of the Soviet Union, there seems to have been little direct cooperation with Soviet Russian scholars. One exception was the dictionary of mining terminology, which involved several non-Ukrainian Soviet scholars, most likely due to the specifics of the Russified mining industry in the eastern part of Ukraine.Footnote 73 Belorussian terminologists, who at the time were conducting equally intensive work on their language, visited Kyiv and exchanged dictionaries, and their work was received with the appreciation of the Institute.Footnote 74 The IUNM also advised other Soviet institutes on how to collect vernacular vocabulary, such as the Institute of Dagestani Culture in Makhachkala.Footnote 75
Non-Soviet Ukrainian institutions would have been the most likely partners in the production of dictionaries, but even here there seems to have been little cooperation. The problem was that even the coordination and exchange of publications was delayed, resulting in divergent vocabularies.Footnote 76 In exceptional cases, dictionaries were even ignored because the differences were considered too great with dictionaries from abroad.Footnote 77 Mathematical terminology was an exception, and this was probably associated with the mentor of Ukrainian mathematicians and pioneer of Ukrainian mathematical terminology, Volodymyr Levytsky. The initiative for cooperation came from the NTSh and was again not coordinated institutionally. Upon learning of the creation of the Dictionary of Mathematics, the relevant section of the NTSh contacted the Kyiv terminologists, although it was too late for them to become actively involved in the creation of the first of the series of dictionaries. Nevertheless, it sent its comments on the draft, which were partially included but acknowledged as L’vivian proposals. The dictionary even included the information that it had been jointly edited by the IUNM and the NTSh. The following dictionary was indeed based on and acknowledged as a cooperative project between Kyiv, L’viv and Odessa.Footnote 78 It was published in a ‘corrected’ edition in 1931, after the first wave of repression, at a time when any further cooperation with non-Soviet organisations was clearly impossible.Footnote 79 In fact, from the mid-1920s onward, cooperation soured for a variety of reasons, often personal, as anti-Soviet resentment outside of the Soviet Union grew. Similarly, cooperation with scholars in Prague, although existent on paper, stuttered from at least the 1926 meeting of Ukrainian scholars in Prague that was boycotted by the VUAN.
Collaboration could also be symbolic, and a number of scientific dictionaries were printed with reference to Verkhradskyǐ, thus placing them in the lineage of Galician terminology. Mathematical dictionaries referred to Levytsky but also added that his vocabulary was insufficient, although this related to the first dictionary, before Levytsky’s participation in the creation of the two others. Galician terms could also enter through the sources used. The botanical dictionary, for instance, used around 21 per cent of sources from Galicia, with 75 per cent from the Romanov Empire and the Soviet Union. Folk vocabulary was sent from several Galician localities but predominantly from the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic, especially villages around Kyiv, Chernihiv and Poltava.Footnote 80 At the same time, Galician vocabulary was already present in other dictionaries in use, such as the works of Hrinchenko and Verkhradskyǐ, which were widely used for scientific vocabulary. Once again, the problems of international collaboration were evident, as the preface to the botanical dictionary mentioned the difficulty of consulting Galician sources, something that could have easily been remedied by collaboration between the NTSh and the IUNM.Footnote 81
Nevertheless, the influence of Galicianisms, limited as it was, became a problem when the policy of Ukrainisation began to change in the late 1920s. The final part of this article will discuss the final rewriting of terminology in the inter-war period, which was associated with the beginning of the policy of Russification.
Away from Galicia
At the end of the 1920s, the IUNM made plans to expand its work considerably. It planned to have branches in all major cities (in addition to a branch in Kharkiv that was mostly associated with Yanata), to intensify contacts with foreign institutions and to oversee new publications in Ukrainian scientific language.Footnote 82 However, problems began to increase as the Stalinist regime began to curtail the korenizatsiia policies in the late 1920s, leading to the growing persecution of those who supported national projects across the country that culminated in the Great Terror of 1936–8. The initial changes comprised alterations to the policy on the implementation of Ukrainisation, with a shift towards prioritising early education over the top-down approach that had placed significant emphasis on re-education of elites. This realignment was accompanied by the assessment that the elite-focused approach had often yielded unsatisfactory outcomes. Despite the presence of divergent opinions regarding the optimal course of action, Stalin and the Politburo maintained their advocacy of Ukrainisation well into the latter part of 1932.Footnote 83 However, as Moscow started to distrust the pro-Ukrainian elites more and more, they started to suppress academic (but also literary) projects.
Minor changes were made to IUNM as early as 1929, when the article for the Academy’s jubilee volume was edited and short passages on Ukrainisation and the popularisation of science were removed.Footnote 84 This was probably related to the general change in the VUAN, whereby a pro-Soviet leadership had been elected in 1928. This had resulted in Krymsky losing his post as secretary, and, in the following, Kholodnyi and seven other leading members of the IUNM were interrogated, arrested and finally sentenced (mostly to prison) in the trial of the Union for the Liberation of Ukraine.Footnote 85
Subsequently, the IUNM became part of the Institute of Linguistics (Instytut Movoznavstva), a suprastructure that brought together several institutes and commissions concerned with language issues, which now covered a wider range of issues. The first director was Hrihorii Tkachenko, a young PhD student from Kyiv and well-known pro-Ukrainisation activist. However, he was persecuted in 1933 and replaced by Naum Kahanovych, a linguist and language activist who had led a campaign against Ukrainian bourgeois linguistics since the 1930s. Kahanovych himself was persecuted in 1937 and executed in 1938. A number of staff were dismissed in 1934 and 1937 and the Institute’s publications became more critical of the Ukrainian language. With each new director came further repression of the people and the language.
The first and only issue of the new Institute’s journal Na movoznavchomu fronti (On the Linguistic Front), published 1931, declared that the Institute should not be a place devoted to the cultivation of the Ukrainian language but to ‘more active participation in the creation of socialism and the use of language as an armour in the class struggle’. Footnote 86 While the title of the journal referred to war, the texts it contained were more corrective than bellicose towards the previous approach, but without a clear coherence of argument. The overuse of ‘provincial’ ethnographic vocabulary and ‘internationalisms’ was described as responsible for the necessary removal of 30 per cent of technical terms, as compared with the previous version.Footnote 87 Further, it was deemed necessary to reverse the conservatism, use of archaic vocabulary and reliance on the Hrinchenko dictionary and its village-based vocabulary and have living language enter the Russian–Ukrainian academic dictionary.Footnote 88 The disparity and lack of communication between the terminological dictionaries and the Russian–Ukrainian academic dictionary were also criticised, and the latter should now take precedence over disciplinary dictionaries. Finally, writings following the new policies castigated the absence of specialists in Russian philology and relations with suspicious organisations abroad.Footnote 89
A programmatic article on terminology from 1933 outlined the rules of new vocabulary production by enumerating the ‘mistakes’ of the previous dictionaries.Footnote 90 The previous approach to work on terminology had to be changed because: a) as the register of the dictionaries was Ukrainian, it suggested that Russian was derived from Ukrainian, and because the words were often similar, it devalued Russian;Footnote 91 b) the Institute’s dictionaries had overused foreign and ‘intellectual’ words;Footnote 92 c) there was a significant difference between their terminology and the authoritative Russian–Ukrainian dictionary; and d) they were not open to the outside world. Political reasons, such as the uncritical adherence to bourgeois theories or Shevchenko’s ideas on the historicity of Ukrainian, were also mentioned, but they were considered secondary to the theoretical reasons and were not discussed in detail.
The change that occurred in 1933 altered the tone of the debate. While Tkachenko had presented himself as a socialist functionary, Kahanovych styled himself as an ideological fighter. The Institute’s new journal, Movoznavstvo (Linguistics), did not have ‘front’ in its title, but it was perhaps the one of the most frequently used words in its texts. The opening article was written not by the new director, but by an influential anti-Skrypnyk activist, Andriǐ Khvylia. The ‘fascists and nationalists’ (mostly bourgeois), which included Tkachenko and Kurylo, who had retained her influential position until then, had been ‘defeated’, and a young generation of ‘Soviet Ukrainians’, under the leadership of the now omnipresent Stalin, faced the ‘class enemy’ in a ‘class war’. Work on dictionaries – not only terminological dictionaries, but also dictionaries of the spoken language, Russian–Ukrainian academic dictionaries and historical dictionaries of Ukrainian (the main areas covered by the Institute until the mid-1930s) – was now subordinated to changed political prerogatives.
It is worthy to note that proximity to Soviet scholars did not mean there were no contacts with foreign academics. In 1936, for example, the Institute was visited by scholars from Harvard, the University of Brno and the University of Strasbourg.Footnote 93 Even socialist political science had to be international, especially since it often referred to internationalism in its rhetoric.
However, the new Institute worked most closely with Soviet Russian scholars, namely Nikolay Marr’s Institute of Language and Mind in Leningrad, whose theories were also frequently referenced in the Institute’s publications. The idea that the languages of Ukrainian and Russian workers were closer to each other than the language varieties of Ukrainian workers and peasants, which derived directly from Marr’s application of the theory of class consciousness to language, challenged the idea of a unified national language in which terms for scientific and literary language could be extracted from peasant speech.Footnote 94 It also laid the groundwork for changes in the way ‘vernacular’ was understood and collected. Marr’s death in 1934 was prominently mourned in the pages of Movoznavstvo, and a few months later the Institute was already working on Ukrainian translations of his writings.Footnote 95
However, the most frequently quoted scholar was neither Marr nor Stalin. The last issue of the journal before the war, in 1938, was devoted to Stalin, but it was published after a wave of repression, when there was little else to print. It was Khvylia, a journalist, deputy commissar of the Ukrainian Commissariat of Education from 1933, and head of the People’s Commissariat’s Commission for the ‘Revolution of Work on the Linguistic Front’, which in 1933 issued a resolution on the ‘Revision of Work on the Linguistic Front’.Footnote 96 His influential 1933 article, ‘To Destroy the Roots of Ukrainian Nationalism’,Footnote 97 translated the resolution into a programme and contained several points that would shape the debate for years to come. While he was writing more generally about language, several points were directly related to terminology.
Clearly, the new terminology should be more pro-Russian and proletarian – and the word proletariat was a key term here, because it meant changing the focus from the agrarian population on which the Ukrainian national movement had previously relied. The proletariat, especially in the main industrial centre of Donbass, spoke Russian and a Russian-influenced version of Ukrainian (now called surzhyk). It is likely that the failure to successfully introduce Ukrainian into higher technical institutions, especially in the eastern Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic, also played a role, although this was not explicitly mentioned.Footnote 98 In Khvylia’s texts, Galician terminology was described as regionalism, often in association with references to nationalism and the bourgeoisie, and was to be eliminated. However, he opted to retain international terms as a kind of heritage of the whole of Europe. In practice, ‘international’ meant Russian, since Russian scientific terminology was heavy with appropriations from other languages, and it was these words that were both given as examples and subsequently changed.
As in the previous twists, theoretical ideas were translated into practical guidelines, although through not a single programmatic text but a series of critiques of previous dictionaries. The dictionaries were amended by means of ‘bulletins’, which published commentaries and lists of vocabulary to be changed.Footnote 99 To give an indication of the quantity of changes, the Botanical Dictionary of 1932 contained 12 per cent of terms that differed from the previous version,Footnote 100 while the Bulletin of Industrial Terminology, published in 1935, spoke of 40–50 per cent of vocabulary that had been changed from the works of the early 1930s to the ‘proletarian’ terminology.Footnote 101
While the bulletins contained only brief comments on the reasons for the changes, longer explanations were published in Movoznavstvo. One type of terminology that was more thoroughly castigated was technical terminology, in line with the new industrialisation policy and Marr’s class understanding of language. Earlier terminologists were accused of mistakenly describing the spoken language of technicians as Russian, when it was in fact the near Russian version of Ukrainian. Allegedly, the IUNM specialists had also removed words that were spoken, but which they considered to have come from Russian and international publications (and therefore not from the people).Footnote 102 The ‘position of an aggressive local nationalism’,Footnote 103 which was ‘anti-proletarian’,Footnote 104 was described as not nationalist but in fact anti-national, because it understood nationality only in a bourgeois way (which was not really explained but seemed to imply a continuity of language between the classes of one nation and not, as Marr would have it, between classes of different nations). Similarly, the instructions for collecting vocabulary were condemned, because they did not collect vocabulary that was actually used, but outdated, ancient and historical vocabulary, since the people who were to be consulted were mostly those who never left the villages, such as the elderly. If there were no vernacular words, ‘anti-proletarian neologisms’ were created, especially through loan translations, where both parts of the word were translated using the vernacular. For instance, znakohon was used for telegraph and zvukohon for telephone. In this case, both of the loanwords already existed in Ukrainian and Russian (telegraf and telefon) and the vernacular terms were therefore rejected.Footnote 105
The period after the politically motivated changes of leadership was quite unproductive for the Institute in terms of terminology. Only a handful of bulletins were produced and a few articles in journals, as most of the activity seemed to be concerned with rewriting the card catalogues and removing unwanted vocabulary from them. Perhaps more importantly, most of the terminologists left or were released in the years 1933–4, including Yanata and Kurylo, who were suspected and then persecuted of ‘Ukrainian nationalism’. The latter’s final act at the Institute was to co-edit On the Linguistic Front, after which she travelled to Moscow to escape persecution. She was eventually arrested in 1938 and sentenced to prison in Karaganda (now Kazakhstan). After her release in 1946, all traces of her disappeared, as did those of her personal papers, which were probably lost in the Moscow chystkas (purges).Footnote 106 Yanata was sentenced to the Gulag and died in Kolyma in 1938. Although there is no reliable data for this, few of those who were working at the Institute in 1933 remained in place after the two waves of repression.
Conclusion
Over the course of almost two decades, the IUNM produced numerous dictionaries that shaped Ukrainian scientific language. After 1991, many of the dictionaries that were published during the first decade of the Institute’s work, before the revisions that brought the terminology closer to Russian, were republished and became cornerstones of modern Ukrainian. Consequently, a project that was the result of a Soviet policy became a key element in the process of de-Sovietising and Ukrainian nation-building.
The comparativist Joep Leerssen wrote that ‘[l]anguage, as an ongoing process of identifying what one’s language is and stands for, constantly involves negotiations, disagreements, quarrels, and bickering’.Footnote 107 The history of Ukrainian scientific language demonstrates how this dynamic process of language design was shaped by a multitude of factors, including cultural, social, political and epistemic interests. It is erroneous to assume that changes and reorientations can be explained by a single factor. Rather, they occurred at the intersections of multiple factors, including political upheavals. However, even these events were connected to knowledge about language. This is illustrated by both the Romantic idea of folk language as a pure, original source of vocabulary and Marr’s theories that privileged class affinities and cultural-cum-national ones.
The geographical context of terminology design was also of paramount importance. The 1930s terminology was subject to criticism on the grounds that it was overly reliant on the vocabulary of Galicia, which was not part of the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic. On the other hand, the vocabulary of Donbass workers, which had previously been absent from the language design, was to be given greater consideration. This was a logical step from the perspective of state-building, or more specifically, socialist-republic building and Marr’s theories. However, it ran counter to the logic of ethno-nationalist language designers, who regarded it as a language that was too similar to Russian. As language is closely connected to geography, within the constraints of their resources, Verkhradskyǐ and the IUNM sought to incorporate the vocabulary of the regions they perceived as part of their nation’s territory, regardless of whether their concept of the nation differed.
Geographical change was associated with social change, as the working class replaced the peasantry as the most important class of the nascent Ukrainian nation. This occurred concomitantly with the mass starvation of the peasantry during the Holodomor 1932–3. In this context, language played a dual role in the formation of the nation and the process of modernisation, but at the same time it was informed by social imaginaries connected to them. Moreover, language cannot be disentangled from these processes, in the same way that nationalisation and modernisation cannot be neatly separated.
To a large extent, the changes applied to the making of the Ukrainian scientific language corresponded to the distinction between korenizatsiia and Ukrainisation as proposed by Olena Palko to mark the differences between what the politicians in the centre (Moscow) and the local politicians wanted to do.Footnote 108 As in the literature, the policy change also meant a change in the main actors in terminology-making, although some were able to adapt to the new conditions, at least until the more far-reaching changes of 1933. At the same time, the story told here shows that throughout the 1930s, the restriction of korenizatsiia meant the gradual encroachment of the Russian language into the Ukrainian, even though the policy was never officially revoked. One could even venture the thesis that the policy was never revoked because the ideal language to be taught to future generations changed, allowing a certain version of Ukrainian nationalism to coexist with socialist modernisation within the Soviet state.
The case of Ukrainian scientific language also helps us pose new questions for other languages that underwent similar, if not analogous, experiences of boundary changes or whose development was shaped by changes of regimes with different language policies. The bird’s-eye teleological perspective of the final product, i.e., the respective literary language, has obscured the analytical view, leaving the experiments and the paths not taken – or only briefly taken – out of the historian’s view. The entanglements and disentanglements between the varieties of Ukrainian show that the history of standardisation is a very dynamic process that allows a fine-grained view of not only language history but also the history of nations and nationalisms. It is also as accidental and contingent as they are, although their relationship to one another, as this article has revealed, is not as straightforward as textbook knowledge might suggest.
Acknowledgements
The writing of this article was supported by the Lumina Quaeruntur Fellowship of the Czech Academy of Sciences (Grant ID LQ300772201) entitled ‘Images of Science’ in Czechoslovakia 1918–1945–1968. The author is grateful to the members of the project, organisers and participants of the conference ‘Mapping multilingual (counter-)expertises: Scientific and political knowledge production across borders in the long twentieth century’ (University of St Andrews, 23–24 August 2023), Galina Babak and two anonymous reviewers of Contemporary European History for comments on earlier versions of this text.
